He wakes, slowly, the peace slipping from his face to be replaced by distrust and annoyance as he eyes her coldly and then cracks his neck sharply in the night. She mimics the bend of his head, though her bones do not pop, she giggles and nearly salivates down her ivory chin at the sight and sound of odd bend that tilts his face. She breathes deeply once, twice, nostrils curving and fluttering beneath the hot wind that is scented, the strange lust to touch that very crown to which she indicates as she speaks.

He snorts, rolling his eyes and looking away. She sneers, savage and dark, her retort silent but for the shaky and ragged breath that breaks the stillness of her watching, her catching of his impudent questions and replies. An ear flicks back, settling upon the fine silk strands of her ivory mane, the wind a low crooning whisper across her flanks as her eyes narrow, lips curl in retort.

But a noise, it draws them both away from one another, and he smells of snow and wandering. Golden with crisp, pale details, she rummages his figure with accusatory stares, her eyes sharp and cold as the ice from which they both have hailed on this ruddy evening. Grim, her expression is one of judgment, one of dislike of surprises, one that wonders why some arrive with words that flash and bend like the teeming masses of fish in the spawning season, leaping and striving to reach the peak of the stream.

Both ears have fallen, and like a serpent she bends and weaves her head low and neck shapely, silvery eye reflecting light in all the ways the darkness of its companion swallows it hungrily. Any logic in his words is lost in her momentary irritation of being intruded upon, of having stolen her precious aloneness with the bloody crowned one.

Still, the sound of a tail striking flesh and the wickedness with which the beast replies to the strange one who had followed her in steals her attentions, never long alighted, swift and unstill as gnats upon decaying flesh in the flitting of their hoard. He is being unkind, uncouth; it simply will not do, not for someone who loiters in the wood of the nameless, of the unwanted, the unclaimed. She is not branded, nor owned, but she belongs more so than crown of blood and the golden man is arrogant and foolish but worthy of more than what he receives for his jester’s bravado.

"You wander the wood of the wandering," she croons, face a devilish caricature of darkness and beauty, decay and everlasting grace, "head of nothing, you need more help than you think." She snorts and glances over at the talkative man who descended from the stone as well, her eyes no less harsh or full of judgment, no more inviting than they are to the dark one that she should be enticing, who she has forgotten such things of until…

Strange mare, gifts. Gifts.

Oh, oh yes.

He was not for her, he was never hers.
Sharply, with cryptic speed, she returns her eyes to the one adorned with such lovely gore, a giggle rising out from her lungs in a sweet and seraphic symphony of sound before it abruptly dies in the delicate notes of her words. "More help than you think, crown of blood," she snaps, "we were all gifts, once. You are no different."

Haughtily her delicate face lifts, eyes cast above to the dark imprints of leaves against the pale glow of the black sky.

"We can offer things to you," she croons to the night, "is it so wrong to be wanted?"



Beloved
rust every place that I touch